Organize blog tour to promote your book

Setting up a series of book readings and signings at bookstores, libraries and retailers carries a lot of risk. Primarily, you have to sell enough books to cover the cost of driving to the locations and probably for dining and lodging. Yet, even with a good promotional effort, very few people may show up for the event.

A much less risky alternative is to do a blog tour. Such an event involves you appearing on a different blog on several consecutive days. Each blog gets its own unique “presentation” from you – one might run a guest blog written by you, another might be a Q&A interview of you, another might be a news story focusing on some aspect of your book.

This virtual tour immediately eliminates the cost of gas, meal and hotels. Even better, it focuses on hundreds of people who would be specifically interested in your book; blogs attract like-minded people internationally whereas a reading at a brick-and-mortar store’s audience is limited to those who live in that locality.

A blog tour will take some effort to organize. You’ll have to identify and then contact blog owners to determine if they’re interested, nail down topics and dates that don’t overlap, create unique written material, and then cross-promote one another. You’ll want to start arranging the tour at least several weeks before the tour is to take place, which usually coincides with you book’s release.

Ideally, you want readers of each blog to follow you through the other blogs. This gives each blog owner an incentive to participate. The benefits of the blog tour then will be two-fold for you – more book sales and more followers of your own blog.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 300 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.